Various sources report that composer Shirley Walker has died at age 61. Walker was best known as Danny Elfman’s orchestrator for many scores, and also worked on many animated WB series:

The composer was something of a trailblazer for women film composers, scoring an array of projects from the early 1980s including Memoirs of an Invisible Man, Willard and the Final Destination trilogy. Walker worked largely in a comfortable niche of dark movie material and a host of animated incarnations of favourite comic books, including Superman, Batman and Spawn, though she was more than able in other genres, as scores like Willard showed. The talented composer also served regularly as an orchestrator, arranger and conductor, most notably perhaps for Danny Elfman, with whom she worked on Batman and Batman Returns amongst others.

Paul Dini remembers Walker here.
Via Mark Evanier and my mother comes word that writer Chris Hayward died last week. Hayward was best known for his work on sitcoms like Barney Miller and The Munsters, but was also one of the key writers for THE BULLWINKLE SHOW.